


276. atlantis

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [138]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mermaids, apparently not a tag for uh some reason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-08-31 04:10:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8563474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: “I could drown you,” whispered the mermaid softly. “For the men who fall I let them thrash and scream and die, but for you I could show you how it could be easy. Like falling asleep, only softer. I promise that it is the nicest way to die.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: references to drowning, reference to decomposition, blood & stuff]

“Come a little closer,” says the mermaid from the water. With just her head above water, she looks almost human; the scraps of meat around her mouth, and the sharpness of her teeth, are all that separate her from someone just like Sarah.

“Yeah, no thanks,” says Sarah. She tosses another chunk of raw beef into the air and the mermaid propels herself out of the water, catches it in her mouth and swallows it whole in one terrifying, inhuman gesture. She flops back into the water. Her tongue licks around her lips.

“I could leap,” says Helena conversationally, “and catch you, and drag you under.”

“You could,” says Sarah in the same conversational tone. Helena glares at her, sinks under the water to the level of her nose and blows frustrated bubbles.

She could. They both know she could. But she won’t.

* * *

Sarah found her washed up on the shore a month ago, tangled up in a net and thrashing with a sort of desperate madness to get out of it. She was beautiful, objectively – the way that a shark is beautiful when it’s in a tank and not directly in front of you. Her tail was already peeling from being out of the water, but you could tell that it would shine silver and silver and gold.

When Sarah got close enough, the woman in the net stopped thrashing. She rolled over. Her teeth were very sharp, and her pupils were slitted painfully in the light.

Sarah stared at her. She stared at Sarah.

Then she lunged.

The net tripped her and she _screamed_ , high and angry, and lunged again. And again. And then realized, slowly, that she wasn’t getting out of the net. And then she said:

“Help.”

“Why,” Sarah said shakily. “You just tried to – _eat_ me or somethin’, yeah?”

“I don’t want to die,” said the woman in the net. “Please. Help.” Her fingers reached through the weave of the net. They weren’t webbed, or anything. Just fingers. They had the right amount of joints; they looked like they shouldn’t.

“Why shouldn’t I let you,” Sarah said.

The hand fell limply to the sand. “I could drown you,” whispered the mer—whispered the woman softly. “For the men who fall I let them thrash and scream and die, but for you I could show you how it could be easy. Like falling asleep, only softer. I promise that it is the nicest way to die.”

“I don’t want to die,” Sarah said.

“I don’t know why,” said the woman in the net. “Everything I see up here looks sad and brown and dead. I would want to die, if I had your silly legs and all this sand.”

Sarah didn’t say anything. Silence, for a moment, and then an exasperated sigh and a weak thrashing of tail.

“I can bring you gold,” she said. “And jewels, and maps, and treasures. From all the way down at the very bottom. Very shiny. You can be rich.”

“Go on.”

“If you let me go,” said the woman in the net, clearly warming to her subject, “I can bring you shiny things whenever I find them. I can keep you safe in the water.” She tilted her head, the motion backwards and strange in the sand. “I’ll owe you my life.”

“And you won’t kill me.”

“I’ll owe you,” she said slowly, “my _life_.”

“Fine,” Sarah said. “Deal.” She leaned down, fished out her pocketknife, cut open strands from the net. That _tail_ – impossible, up close, a lean line of muscle and scales. It had fins at the bottom that shone like fairy wings. Sarah wanted to touch that tail so desperately it felt inevitable, but: she didn’t. And the net broke.

And then the mermaid leapt forward, pinned Sarah to the ground, and sank her jaws into Sarah’s throat.

Sarah didn’t even have enough time to panic about it before it was done, and the mermaid was leaning back and flicking a too-long tongue around her teeth. “I know you,” she said. “I know you now. I can smell you.”

She leaned in closer; her hair fell in lank blonde curls around Sarah’s face. “My name is Helena,” she whispered, her breath stinking like Sarah’s blood. “Call me and I will come.” And then she was gone.

* * *

Sarah mostly calls her for gold, but sometimes she does it to make Helena do tricks for chunks of raw hamburger. Helena goes crazy for them, the same way she will go _ballistic_ for candy bars (“Nothing is sweet under the water. Only salt down there.”) or cookies. Helena always comes. Every single time. Sarah just has to go to the edge of the dock and call her name, once, and she’s always there: a mouthful of teeth, a tail flicking in and out of the water, a hundred whispers of how nice drowning would be if Sarah would just _let_ her.

“I don’t get it,” Sarah says, when Helena is snapping up the last scraps of an animal’s heart. “Why d’you want me dead so bad?”

“I love you,” Helena says simply. Her mouth is bloody. The words are too soft on that bloody tongue.

“Don’t think that’s how that works,” Sarah says slowly.

Helena shakes her head, makes a disagreeing sound. “You’re too far up there,” she says, tail lazily writhing back and forth to keep her afloat. “I love you. I want to watch you drown. I want to see the bubbles from your mouth and the way your eyes would get wide and your hair under the water. Everything is prettier down there, and I would get to watch you die. And no one else. Just me. And then you would be dead and I could take you to the parts of the ocean that no one has ever seen and I eat you and you would be inside me forever. And then the little fish would eat you too, nibble nibble, piece by piece, and I could watch you fall apart, and then you would be bones and you would be lovely.”

The worst part of this speech is that she looks sincere, and very soft – pretty as a riptide. Sarah slides an inch back from the edge of the dock, just in case, and Helena sighs low and long and disappointed.

“Someday you’ll see,” she says. “Someday you’ll feel it, and come drown with me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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